By any standard, TOFGA was a huge success! I thought that our pre-conference day-long seminar would not be of much interest. I'm quite pleased to report that I was was thoroughly mistaken! At one point, we were over-sold. At the end of the day, we were one short of being sold out! Ain't bad!
It was a rigorous day. The course manual is really big - about 3/4's inch thick -with a lotta color - it took weeks to prepare. We included stuff that you will not find upon any of our several webcytes. You may recall that the course was conducted by our VP-Ops - Mr Noel Garcia, CCA, and by Dr. Larry Zibilske, our VP-Research. It was an action-and-thrill-packed day - one for the record-books! By the end of it, everyone was completely blown-out!
I did two conference presentations, afterwards, each subsequent day - one on Soil Feritity & Testing, and the other on Plant Nutrition & Testing,,,
We passed out questionarires, after all of them. I'm not sure that we know anymore now, than when we started. The responses were all over the place.... from great to whatever - "What In the World WAS All Of That?!? - To: "Oh. Wow - Cool!"... We are interested in only those who are interested... By the way, it is clear that we have mistakenly assumed a certain degree of basic knowledge - even basic terminoligy/elemental definitions - on the part of all of our seminar/class/session attendees. After seeing, now over so many times, that certain "deer-in-headlights look", we've kinda gotten discouraged.
Actually, we continue to be amazed at how little many growers understand about what they are doing. We are NOT presenting brain-science - it's just kinda basic stuff...
We are having so much response from out-of-state [really huge] growers/farmers (and they wanna learn), that the lab is working way overtime.
Accordingly, the future of our presentations to home-gardeners (and others) in Texas is now seriously problematic - and, we're heavily considering not doing any more seminars, etc., at all - (at least in this state)... We only wanna deal with those who wanna know... We are now travelling more than we would like, all over the country (then, there are the international folks) - to present to the really serious folks...
Here are some links:
www.AskTheplant.comwww.TexasPlantAndSoilLab.comwww.SoilKits.comEnjoy.
We don't debate - we certainly don't argue - but we'll do side-by-side field trials against any other lab - and at the end of the season, we''ll eat the loser... No takers, yet... Actual Field Results!
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